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The importance of Truth

15 Sep

Mi gente,

Listening to the news these days, I am forced to reflect on one theme in all my posts. The theme, if you look at enough of them, is fundamentally (pardon the high mindedness), the evaluation of reality. How do you know what is true? A subtext of many of my posts is the importance of the scientific method as the avatar of discerning what we can approximate as the “Truth”. At the foundation of the scientific method is the critical role of quality evidence for claims.

I have to say that the presidential campaign is highlighting the danger of not being able to rationally evaluate evidence. We are seeing an infamous figure in American life routinely lie and say fantastical things and convincing half the voting populace that he deserves the most power a human can have in the world.

As horrible as this is, it is only a symptom of the problem of the decline of our society…. To list some others are …Zika denialism, climate change deniers, alternative health claims, vaccines, religious bigotry abroad and in the USA (gay, transgender issues), AIDs origins, gender role issues (women & high heels)… the list goes on.

In my view, this is part of an avoidable decline of our society…when people don’t know how to tell what is true or not and don’t even care. Trump success proves that. Millions and millions don’t know what he says is true and don’t care even though the consequences will bite them in the ass. Its the swirl of lies and half lies that get thrown in the public arena that most folks can’t tell what’s what. Telling what’s what is a key human endeavor.

Those of us who have a set of tools that include the requirement for quality evidence (eg. NOT national enquirer lead stories) have an advantage, but are not immune either. Confirmation bias is rampant. Truth discernment is an on-going struggle to figure out what’s what.

However, when you throw the need for evidence out the window, as someone progressive recently told me …(to paraphrase…”I don’t use evidence”), then we reap the whirlwind. As people of color we should be particularly sensitive to this. White supremacy has lies at its foundation…lies about biology, history so on. I would contend that we have to have a high standard, its not just their lies…but lies in general. People of color should strive to attain to the highest degree possible our best discernment of the truth. We shouldn’t even tell comforting lies to ourselves. We have to strive towards truth, or we and all our fellow citizens and humans are on a road to a lesser dark ages, where superstition, tyranny and oppression rule the day. All of this, truly has at its foundation lies, untruths and mendacity.

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National Sovereignty is dead! Part 6: Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): “Investor -State Dispute Settlement”

30 Aug

The “Investor -State Dispute Settlement” part of the TPP is what is currently being considered. It formalizes the stuff that was described in the John Oliver Video. I would draw your attention to the fact that most of the claims come from Developed countries. I would be that most of those come from the USA…so the USA is forcing developing countries (eg. an independent Puerto Rico) to abide by what profits its corporations most. Forcing them to do it by global treaty! Thus, what is the value of National sovereignty then?

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Boricua Futuristics: Part 6 – Renewable Energy

9 Jul

OK Gente,

A key part of the future of Puerto Rico is certainly getting out of debt. Like it or not, that has to be done w/in US economic system. Getting legislative change seems key.

I would contend that if restructuring can happen, one crucial item in the post restructuring phase is renewable energy. They have to replace the dinosaur electrical utility they have…The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA).

Decentralized renewable energy would be a big help! If I did a plan, it would include no taxes for renewable energy companies for x years …tax breaks for those consumers who use it. USA govt. could subsidizing implementation through the Energy Department.

Let PR be laboratory for renewable energy instead of other crap. Lots of engineering strength in PR. Build on that! Could be important.

I would organize island wide folks from engineering departments and ex-NASA folks. They should be encouraged to start a bunch of renewable energy companies. These companies could get US govt and external funding (eg. Solera?) to set up a new grid for PR and then expand the Caribbean and then Florida. Further, PR could make deals to sell some of the electricity generated to northern US states in the winter.

Just a thought.

Sun, wind and engineering! The island has all three!

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Boricua Futuristics: Part 5 No if ands or BUTTS, Hedge Funds are the villains!

6 Jul

OK, modified protest suggestion number 1…

Shouldn’t all the people that protested the god damn fracking butts be out there protesting Fir Tree partners and company, the New York firm that heads a group of 35 hedge funds with a combined ownership of $4.5 billion in Puerto Rican debt?

• Appaloosa Management
• Paulson & Company
• Blue Mountain Capital
• Fundamental Advisors.
• Whoever Paulson sold to
• Charles Blitzer a former IMF official is advising the hedge funds

Since it might take more butts to get folks attention, here ya go!

Butt and Hedge Funds 2

They will determine the fate of Puerto Rico like few other human organizations will in the foreseeable future. THEY ARE IN FRACKING NYC!!! How about we crowdsource the investigation of these 1% Mother frackers and start showing up on their door step????

Occupy Fir Tree Partners!!

Response to Rafael Merino Corte’s comment

3 Jul

RMC: “Global gangster economics. We cannot fight it, but we should at least have a piece of the pie, and be allowed to become good earners for the house masters.”

To that I present the famous poem Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Behemoths of one era bestride the land and the furry rodents scurry away, avoiding their crushing steps. However, in later era, the bones of those fearful monsters stand silent in the museum’s of the descendants of those tiny mammals as lessons of the passage of time.

Boricua Futuristics Part 2

3 Jul

OK mi gente,

Here is my strategic suggestion… Boricua activists out there have their hedge fund hit list….

• Fir Tree partners
• Appaloosa Management
• Paulson & Company
• Blue Mountain Capital
• Fundamental Advisors.
• Whoever Paulson sold to
• Charles Blitzer a former IMF official is advising the hedge funds

We find out all we can about them. Find out if there are Boricuas/Latinos,as in every level from partner to janitor. See if we can get intelligence about them. We can reach out to our Occupy Wall Street friends to get intel on how to do the corporate protests.

Then we have Teach ins about the Puerto Rican situation and about debt, municipal, state and national in general. There is the Greece, Argentina, Detroit, Naomi Klein forum.

Get our congressmen and women to hold hearings on these guys to get them into the light of day. Get our city council representatives to hold hearings on them to get them into the light of day.

Same time, start fleshing out the future. For example, get a congressional agenda together of all the measures that would benefit Puerto Rico in dealing with the crisis.

Then you get the presidential candidates starting with the Dems to come out publicly with their positions re the congressional actions and what they would do vis a vis executive orders.

Remember, this is really about the 1%!!

Then the butt activists target each of these Hedge Fund villains and hold demonstrations against them. Protest them in the hearings as well.

Then we get our sustainability friends & allies (WEACT, Rocky Mountain Institute etc.) to come up with alternative energy plans for Puerto Rico to replace in the market place the fucked up power authority with distributed wind and solar alternatives.

What do ya’ll think?
J

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Boricua Futuristics…. Part 1

3 Jul

Hello all,

I have didn’t write new posts for my blog for some time. I haven’t gotten back to flowers in a while due to the exigencies of my work life. HOWEVER, I feel compelled to put out some thinking on what I am calling Boricua Futuristics or how to think about the future of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. I am compelled because of the dire situation that Puerto Rico is in.

In a “Back to the Future” kind of way, I reflect upon this, thinking of some young man and some woman who, because of economic hardship, are or are planning to leave Borinquen. They may come to meet here in the USA and they may have children. Those children may come to have children. Amongst those children of children, there may be a boy who grows up and dreams.

I am speaking as that boy. A person that is the child of a child of a migrant. My abuelos came to this country 91 years ago because of an economic crisis in those days. An economic crisis that happened 26 years after the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States in 1898 and 8 years after the USA legislated that all Puerto Ricans were US citizens. A child that was born in the year 1898 and a citizen in 1917 could have been the parent of my grand parents and probably were. There was very few opportunities for them in those days because of a vast economic transformation grinding poverty was rampant and they came to NYC to make a better life. Their child was born about 17 years before another upheaval caused the big wave of Boricuas to come to NYC and other destinations.

91 years later I am observing a similar situation. A vast economic transformation is causing migration. People are leaving in droves. The economics calls upon us to contemplate the politics and sociology and indeed the future. This is what I’m going to do.

One future I can imagine is a Puerto Rican dystopia where the island is depopulated and non-Puerto Ricans become the majority. You might see it as transnational gentrification, the whites move in to the neighborhood the original residents can’t afford anymore.

This would be the beginning of the end of Puerto Ricans…with no cultural anchor…the culture will disintegrate and pass into the dustbin of history. Kind of a cultural extinction event. Cultures, like species can become extinct.

There are other peoples that have been driven off their land. Just ask Palestinians and Native folks. The continuance of their cultures is a real issue. We are talking about glacially slow, but inexorable processes.

This is all happening in the era of the meteoric rise of the 1%…the “Masters of the Universe” that are in control of many more planetary resources than ever before. The city, state and national bankruptcies are just the footprints of the behemoths striding across the globe. The various cities in the USA (in Detroit and other small municipalities, Stockton CA) States such as Illinois and nations such as Puerto Rico and Greece. We have to think, not just about how we got here, but where are we going.

I’m going to try to do a little bit of that.

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Part four: My AI overlord

5 Jul

One of my favorite social commentators Chris Hedges has spoke against “Utopianism”. He says utopian ideologies end in barbarism. He says the main reason for that is the ugly irrational human impulses and emotions that undermine any human project.  There sure have been many idealistic endeavors that have succumbed to these hard wired tendencies and ended up all fracked up!

Kinda hard to disagree.

This view implies that humans can never arrive at what progressives think of as  justice and peace. This viewpoint, opinion certainly has been challenging for a utopian such as myself.  I’ve always had a view of a more just society.  It seems difficult to move towards a “better” situation if you don’t have an idea of what it looks like in mind.  

What this view seems to imply is that humans cannot manage their affairs in a peaceful and just way.  What’s difficult to believe about that is that there has been progressive change over history.  Hedges doesn’t seem to account for that.  It seems unlikely to me that he is advocating a blind random walk through a forest of social configurations that may or may not be better for humanity.  

However, I do think that a forward march to progress is not guaranteed.  it is very much provisional.  We may or may not progress to a more just, humane and egalitarian society.  

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Part 3: My AI Overlord — I just watched the movie “Transcendence”

4 Jul

So I just finished the movie “Transcendence”! I found it thought provoking, fairly accurate, but ultimately it didn’t go far enough. It did not present what an intelligence on an exponential curve of self-improvement would ultimately lead to in terms of capabilities.

An intelligence like that, with quantum computing, would be able to run every possible simulation imaginable and many we could not. Humans could not even come close to challenging it. In the movie, it had limitations that I think would be preposterous if it was exponentially I erasing its intelligence.

Once it had ability to interact with the physical world, forget it. The nano, pico and femto- machines would re- organize the world.

However, it is Hollywood, so they had to give the public part of the diet it has been fed for a long time. You need for humans to win in the end. Love beats all etc. The movie could’ve contemplate “losing” a conflict. That was so unrealistic, the AI would have re-written its code so long ago, it wouldn’t resemble at all what it started like. Plus, wouldn’t it would’ve guessed they’d try a virus and have defenses?!?!

The movie had to scale back what it tried to do. Otherwise, people would have to eat a new food and that would NOT go down well.

HW has bred a fan base on a certain diet of stories. The viewers come to expect it. That is all they have ever eaten. Simple example . They can’t have the AI “win”. That is against the diet of happy endings. This movie leaned more on the humans win side, with a hint of otherwise. Couldn’t be the reverse.

They couldn’t have envisioned a world where the human species has evolved beyond now. They could have even pictured a scenario where “normal” humans have been preserved if they want to be, but they would be handicapped so to speak. They’d be like a person with Down’s syndrome now. That would be a negative message for viewers, a downer and hence not in the diet. Even if it was speculation. The spec can’t stray too far from humans now! Iron rule!!

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Part 1 of my series … My AI overlord

4 Jul

OK, for the first part of this series, I would have to ask my friends….

Do you think evolution is a fact of nature?

Do you think humans evolved?

Do you think humans are evolving?

Do you think that evolution is natural?

IF your answer to all these questions is yes, then it should surprise you that the humans of the future will not be the same as the humans of today. To incorrectly anthropomorphize, one might even say that this is what nature intended.

Just as we supplanted the Neanderthals, Denosovians, Hobbits and the mysterious others, so shall some further evolved homo species supplant us. Thus is the order of things.

Anybody have a problem with this?

So why am I asking these questions? Its because I think that we as a species are not at the end of our line.  We are continuing to evolve.  An important question is whether people have moral, ethical, gut, rational issues about how we continue to evolve.   If folks acknowledge that we can and should continue to evolve, then they might say that if its “natural”, it has to be random.  if its purposeful, then somehow it is not ok.  

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